


bubble

by Anonymous



Series: the dead and the dreaming [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, Dream Bubbles (Homestuck), F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-25
Updated: 2014-11-25
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:35:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22888549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: The story of Feferi Peixes, age 7 sweeps, following the death of one lowblooded Sollux Captor.
Relationships: Sollux Captor/Feferi Peixes
Series: the dead and the dreaming [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1630873
Kudos: 1
Collections: Anonymous





	bubble

When you learn what has become of Sollux, you are undone with rage and grief. You leave the hive, going nowhere. You swim as far as you can, propelled by the storm of emotion in your chest, as if if you swam far enough and hard enough you could get to somewhere where this wasn’t happening.

You kill a whole pod of blubberbeasts and then feel terrible about it. Their blood swirls around you in the water and sorrow wracks you to your gills.

You are furious at Aradia. How could she? How could she do this to him? How could she do this to you? You only sort of understand what happened, and that Vriska and her mind tricks were involved somehow, but you are so angry—if Aradia had just been smarter, or faster, or _something_ , she wouldn’t have had to kill him to get away—if she had been a better moirail, or matesprit, or whatever it is she is to him—was to him—if she had just gotten things to go _differently_ —

You crumple up on the seafloor and cry. It’s not a very dramatic gesture, being already surrounded by saltwater and all, but fuck it. It feels like there’s no one left in the world who matters to see you anyway.

* * *

Your lusus can tell you are grieving. _What is wrong, child?_ she asks you.

When you tell her, she undulates a local section of tentacles in a way that you recognize as being like a sigh. _You are very, very young,_ she rumbles to you, her voice kept low. This is the first of many deaths you will experience. A small tentacle unfurls towards you, like a hand extending. _He was only a lowblood. He would have died before you anyway. His end came only a fraction of a blink earlier than it would have had he lived out his whole lifespan._

You know about the lifespan thing, dammit. You know! You don’t need her telling you this. “It’s not _fair_!” you yell, not knowing what else to say to her.

_Many things in this life are not fair,_ she tells you.

You and your mother always speak this way: you shout and rage and she whispers, her softest tones still louder than you could ever manage, sending shock waves through the water. In all your fury you still feel small.

_He was only a lowblood._ Hearing her saying the same words as Eridan makes you sick. You swam over to his hive in person the night after you found out, seeking some of the grounding a moirail might provide, and proceeded to have a huge blowout fight over his lack of sympathy for Sollux and his failure to act appropriately pale (or from his view, your failure to act appropriately unpitiful toward Sollux, considering you weren’t in a quadrant with him). You return to your hive with your anger now forking out in three directions—you’re mad at Aradia, you’re mad at Eridan, you’re mad at your lusus.

You feel so stupid and helpless. You’re supposed to be the Empress, but you’re not yet, and you don’t have the force of the whole Alternian Empire at your command to make the universe do what you want it to. You’re just a girl at the bottom of the ocean and you can’t even stop one stupid lowblood from dying.

* * *

Aradia defended herself, even against someone she loved. You should consider it admirable that she displayed that kind of ability for ruthless self-preservation that every troll should aspire to. But she took Sollux away from you, and you can’t forgive her for that. You wish, often and bitterly, that it could have been her that died instead.

It’s not like you could say anything about it to her even if you wanted to. She has mostly disappeared from Trollian, and you only know that she’s still alive from reluctant reports you have to draw out from Tavros. Even those are sparse on details, although you think that’s partially because Tavros is hesitant to tell you much about her for fear you’ll get mad. All you know is that she is laying low, and that she is apparently “uH, nOT DOING VERY WELL, eMOTIONALLY SPEAKING, aND ALL.” 

Well, good. It’s the least she deserves. Aradia loved him too, you know. But no one could have loved Sollux more than you.

* * *

Your lusus has watched many empresses before you. She has seen it all, and does not often make exceptions.

You do not know what it is that moves her to do this for you.

She acts fairly quickly by her standards, which is to say it is nearly a sweep before she mentions the matter to you again. It’s a long time to you, but you’ve come to know at this point in your life that this is just how long it takes her to make decisions. You’re always waiting and waiting and waiting for her to act, to make up her mind, and you’ve never been a patient girl.

So you thought she’d forgotten about Sollux. It certainly seemed like she expected you to. 

You bring him up one night and—you honestly didn’t mean that much of anything by it, it was just something you said because you were mad. You and your lusus are having another spat where most of the yelling is on your part, this one about Eridan, whose behavior in the past few perigees has become more concerning, and you fear is going beyond your capacity as a moirail to reign in. Your lusus responds as she often does, with little more than a noncommittal humming tone and a long undulating gesture of the tentacles that you have come to interpret like a shrug, a sort of _well, what do you want me to do about it_. Just before you leave in a huff, you tell her, “Fine! What do you care, anyway. Forget about him, the same way you forgot about Sollux. None of them matter to you. Fine.”

But you discover that she did remember him.

The next night, she whispers to you: 

_Child._

You ignore her, sulking, and don’t come out of your hive.

_CHILD._

She calls you again, slightly louder now, probably loud enough to make local marifauna bleed from the brain. Again you don’t answer.

_FEFERI._

She has never, not that you can remember, called you by your name. You suppose she must have when you first received it, but until now you thought that maybe she didn’t even know it anymore, hadn’t bothered remembering the sound for just another fingerling empress who would be lost under the trident soon enough.

You come out of the hive.

When you find her, she’s silent again, and you lose your patience. 

“Well?” you yell. “What do you want?”

She speaks in a low, low whisper, one that even you have trouble hearing. She is telling you something not for the rest of the ocean, just for you.

_you are still just a fry, and he was your first brush with death._

Great. She’s called you out here to give you another fucking lecture. She pauses for a long time, as she always does on the rare occasions when she speaks more than one sentence at a time, and you’re beginning to consider just swimming off on her.

_you are sadder than any empress i have seen in a long, long time._

That gives you pause. Sad? You don’t think of yourself as particularly sad.

_i am giving you a gift,_ she says. _speak to him again. set yourself right._

“A gift?” You don’t understand. “What do you mean, speak to him?”

_oh, child._ Her whisper to you is full of tender pity. You never hear anything like that in her voice.

Whatever she’s trying to tell you, you don’t think you can understand it. You turn around and go back to your hive.

* * *

You’re in Sollux’s respiteblock. You’ve never been there in person, but you recognize it, and you stand there now. 

Sollux is there. He is there in full flesh and living color, except for his eyes, which are all milky white. He doesn’t seem as excited by his miraculous return from the dead as you are; he speaks to you casually, as if the two of you were already in the middle of a conversation. 

When you shout and blubber and overflow at him in a sudden torrent of emotion, the outburst is enough to jar him, to make him realize that something is different about this place. Not different from how he remembers, but too much like he remembers, more still than a real living place could be, a dream frozen in place. You watch him realize his condition, come to his conclusion: so then I’m dead, he tells you. You feel unforgivable for bringing it to his attention. 

This wasn’t supposed to happen, he tells you. You say that no, of course it wasn’t!

No, he tells you, I mean this wasn’t _supposed_ to happen. Not like this.

You wake up and realize that you’re back in your own respiteblock, in the present and alone. You immediately swim out to your lusus and demand to know how to get back to him. 

_You only have to wait,_ she says. _You will see him again._

This is SUCH hoofbeastshit. This is literally unbelievable to you. “I don’t want to wait!” you wail. You hear the whine in your voice but are unable to stop yourself. “I _had_ him, I want to see him _now_!”

_You are very impatient,_ says your lusus, and then doesn’t speak again. It’s clear she’s done talking to you.

You go home and pace the long hallways of your hive for hours, jetting restlessly from window to window. You know, begrudgingly, that whatever brought you back to him was through your lusus’s power, far beyond any of your own capabilities, and there’s nothing you can do to rush it. You can swim all you want and you can’t get back to that place on your own. But your body still feels like it has to move, somehow, keep searching.

Eventually at the end of the night, with nothing else to do, you go back to your recuperacoon. You can’t sleep for a while. Even the pacifying chemical touch of the sopor can’t get your mind to fully quiet. But eventually your consciousness drops out, and when it comes back you’re there with Sollux again.

The experience is clearer the second time around. Your awareness still wavers between clarity and dreaminess, but less often now, and you feel kind of like you’re finding your feet with this thing. You have a better sense of what it is, this bubble that you’re enveloped in.

Your metaphysical whereabouts are more coherent this time, but the presence of Sollux himself still leaves you feeling scrambled and flustered and unexpectedly sad. You have all this opportunity, you could tell him all the things you always wanted to say, ask him all your questions, just tell him that goddammit, you _miss_ him, but you struggle to pick out one thing to say from the jumble. What eventually rises to the top is, _why did you let her kill you?_

Well, he was being mind-controlled at the time, he reminds you. But you’re right in a way, because Aradia was supposed to be the one to die, not him. He guesses that Vriska’s hold on him faltered for a moment, gave Aradia enough time to fight back against him.

Are you angry at her, you ask him?

No, he tells you, he doesn’t think so. Vriska had him coming at her pretty viscously. She didn’t have much of a choice other than to stop him any way she could. It’s hard to feel too mad here, in this consequence-free bubble of memory where both the past and the future have their impacts softened. Besides, he’s not sure he could stay truly mad at Aradia, not for anything.

Does it hurt to die, you ask him?

Uh, yeah, he says, obviously. A whole fucking lot.

When you wake, you’re thinking of Aradia again, strangely enough. Talking to Sollux has softened your feelings toward her. You’ve never heard anyone speak of her in such a tender way. Before all this you just thought she was kind of weird, and until now you thought you hated her, but now, now that you’ve seen Sollux’s face again, been close for him to be real again, it feels wrong for you to be angry at this girl he loved.

But all that fury in you isn’t quite ready to leave you entirely just yet, and when you think about what Sollux said, it finds a new place to move onto, something you feel foolish for not having thought of yourself after all this time. Aradia may have been making herself scarce since the incident, but you still talk to Eridan, as bad an idea as that may be lately, and you have a pretty good idea of where to find Vriska.

You are not yet the Empress, but you have a rage in your heart and a long slick of sharp gold in your hand, and this is where you will build your reign from. You are one girl standing alone in the vast ocean, but as this new determination runs through you, you remember that it is your ocean, and if you get to decide what happens here, you’re going to start with this.

God help Vriska Serket.


End file.
